When the cancer that has taken Martin Crowe from us far too early had finally, inexorably, got its hooks into him, he exchanged emails with the Indian cricket writer Dileep Premachandran, and there is no apology for quoting from them now. It was late last September, the occasion of his 53rd birthday, and Crowe was making sense of his condition, about how he felt of facing the imminent prospect of death. “It’s a fine line mentally,” Crowe writes,” do I judge my life as a joy or as sitting in death row?” It is both philosophical and rhetorical: I don’t think I have ever come across someone who has faced their demise with more rational fortitude and acceptance.

It is just under a year, during the Cricket World Cup, that last I saw him. 16 March was a beautiful day in Auckland: he collected me in his 4x4 from my hotel. Far from seeing someone ravaged by the disease, as I had expected, I was surprised how well he looked, tanned and full-faced. Even the total hair loss might have been put down to a family trait, if his brother Jeff is anything to go by. Certainly at one time, he had tinkered with a slightly absurd weave so it had been heading that way. We drove for lunch to Woodpecker Hill, a new restaurant in Parnell that he was keen on.

Martin Crowe obituary

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Besides we two there were three friends of his, one of them mutual. The food was excellent, the wine wonderful (one of our number was a wine merchant), the conversation stimulating and happy. And when it was over, we stood in the sun, said goodbye and hugged. There was the realisation that in all probability we would never again meet. It was he who comforted me.

That day, he had told me that he had been given a 5% chance of living for a further year. The odds were correct: he was 13 days shy of that 12 months when he passed away peacefully. He had been diagnosed with follicular lymphoma a couple of years previously but appeared to be in remission, cleared, until the cancer returned, in the virulent terminal form of double-hit lymphoma. The apparently hale nature of his condition was a camouflage. When he was awake, he said, he did indeed feel good, but rather than undergoing yet more chemotherapy he was by then self-medicating with liquid marijuana and sleeping 15 hours a day. Happy hours though, he said.

Has there ever been a sharper cricket mind? Not in my experience. For all the orthodoxy of his play, he was an innovator

It is the best part of four decades since first I saw him. I was playing as professional in Auckland, and he, just 16, was beating out his hundreds relentlessly for Auckland Grammar, enchanting all who saw him bat in the verdant environs of the Cornwall club, and was on the verge of making the Auckland side itself. Clearly he was an exceptional talent, although that in itself does not necessarily transfer into achievement. But I saw him when he was on the MCC ground staff at Lord’s and, a few years later, when he was playing for Somerset, he became my penultimate first-class wicket. By then he was already established as a Test batsman, who at the Basin Reserve in Wellington had scored against England the first of what were to be 17 Test centuries.

Martin Crowe in action against England at Lord’s in 1994, when he made a brilliant 142. Photograph: Colorsport/Rex/Shutterstock

A Test average of slightly more than 45 falls short of a generally accepted benchmark for greatness, but the figures, as often happens, do not tell the true story of a batsman of the very highest quality even at a time when the chronic knee condition that curtailed his career was incapacitating him. I have a contention (one with which he profoundly disagreed but which I still hold) that so good a technician was he that he devoted his energies not just to attempt to be the best batsman in the world, but to create the ultimate, definitive clinical batsman.

His preparations were never less than meticulous. At Lord’s, in 1994, virtually on one leg, he made 142 against England that was a masterpiece of technical excellence, and he followed it with 115 in the second innings of the match at Old Trafford, after New Zealand had followed on: either would serve as a masterclass in the construction and execution of a Test match innings. One day, when Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were at the height of their reverse-swinging powers, he expounded to me the theory of playing it, by staying inside the line and looking to the offside: of many tributes, the one in which Wasim rates him the best batsmen to whom he bowled, rates very highly.

Has there ever been a sharper cricket mind? Not in my experience. For all the orthodoxy of his play, he was an innovator, someone ahead of his time by years. He denied it strongly (not wishing to appear skittish in his practice) but one day at Lord’s, when he was a groundstaff lad, I saw him switch-hitting. It was his thinking that came up with the idea of Cricket Max, a short form of the game that we can now see as a precursor to Twenty20 (one day, we might see his idea for straight hits clearing the boundary being worth double morphing into extra runs for the distance struck). Much is made of his impact on the 1992 World Cup (although he was always at pains to point out that his career lasted a good deal longer than the few weeks of that tournament). That he introduced the strategy of opening the bowling with an off-spinner, Dipak Patel, and the batting with the whirling pinch-hitting blade of Mark Greatbatch, is almost cliche now, but what is rarely acknowledged is that this was something dreamed up on the hoof, after they had played three matches in more orthodox fashion.

New Zealand lost the semi-final to Pakistan that year, undone by the emerging genius of Inzamam-ul-Haq, but even then it is a match and possibly tournament New Zealand might well have won had their captain, who had made a brilliant 91 with the bat, not been forced from the field with injury and unable to shepherd them through.

Beyond a brief Indian Premier League stint, he never took to coaching, which is the game’s loss. For a period, he had even been shunned by the national team. But he became an outstanding writer and talker on the game, and a brilliant mentor to young players not least the “two sons I never had”, Ross Taylor, whom he helped through the difficult time following his sacking as New Zealand captain, and Martin Guptill. As much as anything, it is his ethos of fair play, responsible behaviour and enjoyment, that the Black Caps now buy into. That in itself is a legacy to treasure.